


Almost Home

by SugarFey



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: be_compromised, F/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:46:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1884144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/pseuds/SugarFey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> ‘Home’ is a word in a language not her own. </i>
</p>
<p>Natasha has never longed for home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).
  * Inspired by [On Names](https://archiveofourown.org/works/474833) by [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/pseuds/inkvoices). 



> This is a remix of Inkvoices' wonderful fic, 'On Names.' It's a beautiful study of what names mean to Natasha. This gave me the idea for a study of what home means to Natasha and how her conception of home develops.
> 
> Many thanks to Enigma731 for thinky thoughts, to Shrike_Attack and AlphaFlyer for the beta, and of course to Inkvoices for writing the original fic!

Natasha has never longed for home.

Her life exists in transit, from cover to cover, an endless adulthood of missions and a childhood that was no childhood at all. She carves out a collection of memories in the spaces, images and feelings that are uniquely hers: a scar, the smooth grip of her favourite gun, an afternoon in a café that wasn’t special except that she was on her own. An arsenal of experiences that sum up Natasha.

When she comes to S.H.I.E.L.D she spends the two weeks in a cell and the next few months in a tiny room on a base, which she’s not allowed to know the name of. The walls are whitewashed and the bed is small but surprisingly comfortable. There’s a locker for her handful of clothes and an empty bookshelf that sits bolted in the corner, as if they expect her to fill it. She can see it from her bed, like an unanswered question.

She is given clearance to use the gym, but only under supervision. No one offers to take her and she doesn’t ask, so she spends her time between interviews and therapy lying on her bed and staring at the ceiling, or doing exercises to keep fit. She’s doing push-ups when there is a knock on the door. Natasha keeps going, waiting for whoever knocked to let themselves in. When she hears another knock, she realises that the person on the other side is waiting for her response.

“Come in,” she grunts, without stopping. She watches the door swing open out of the corner of her eye, and a man in black tac gear walks in. Barton.

“Hey,” he says, looking down at her. “I was going to see if you wanted to train, but I see you’re ahead of me.”

“Did Fury tell you to take me?” she shoots back, rolling onto her back so she can switch to stomach crunches.

“No. But you do have a physical assessment tomorrow.” He takes a few steps into the room, looking around. There are smudges of oil on his exposed arms and a small cut on his cheekbone that has been freshly stitched. That explains his absence over the past two weeks.

“This place sure is cosy,” he says nonchalantly, leaning back against the far wall with his arms folded. “Any idea how long you’ll be in here?”

Natasha pauses mid-crunch, waiting for the satisfying burn in her muscles. “You tell me.”

“It’s pretty cold in here. You warm enough?”

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” she answers, bristling at the hint of concern in his voice. It’s unprofessional of him.

“Never said you couldn’t.”

When she returns from therapy she finds a bag with a red quilt inside resting against her door.

 

* * *

 

She moves into a one-room apartment in Manhattan because her psychologist tells her to, and keeping him happy helps secure her future with S.H.I.E.L.D. The apartment is partially furnished and she leaves on a mission with Barton before she can unpack her bag.

Barton invites himself over once they arrive back in New York. He lingers in the doorway as if he expects her to tell him to go, and his attempt at decency is almost laughable.

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” he remarks after a few awkward minutes. “Any of these things actually yours?”

She has to give him credit; his codename is well earned. For someone from a military background rather than one in espionage, he doesn’t miss much. “I told the landlord I’m an art restorer who travels a lot.”

“Got to keep the cover, I get it.” Clint wanders over to a collection of paints taking up space in the corner.

“I grew up in foster homes, mostly,” he continues, sliding his hands into his pockets. “First few places I was sent, I unpacked, put my things on the shelves. But I never stayed anywhere long, so, I stopped bothering. Seemed like there was no point, you know? Then I joined the circus—don’t laugh—and then the army, and everything I owned had to fit in one bag. I still have it. The bag, that is. When I got my own place, I kept it by the door, still packed up. Couldn’t bring myself to trust that I wouldn’t have to leave again.”

“What do you want, Barton?” she asks tiredly.

“I don’t want anything from you.”

She snorts, to show him what she thinks of that.

“All I’m saying is, I don’t know exactly what you’re going through. And I’m not trying to get you to compromise your cover. But you’re allowed to make this place feel more like a home, if you like.”

Natasha says nothing and lets him interpret her silence however he wants. ‘Home’ is a word in a language not her own.

“I brought you a housewarming present,” he says. Instinct makes Natasha tense when he reaches into his backpack. His eyes flick up at her and he slows down, holding the backpack open so she can see the contents. He draws out an object wrapped in brown paper, which he unwraps in front of her.

It’s a teacup made out of sturdy, dark blue china. Barton sets it on the countertop, a flash of colour against the white.

 

* * *

 

Natasha finds a second-hand copy of _Doctor Zhivago_ in a bookstore in Minsk, and after a moment’s hesitation, buys it to read on the flight back to New York. The book sits beside her bed in the apartment and she gets a bedside lamp to read it by. After that, she reads F Scott Fitzgerald for a foray into American literature, and then some Hemingway, whom she doesn’t like. In a few months the pile of books is higher than the bed.

On a mission in São Paulo, ‘Barton’ becomes ‘Clint’ while she applies pressure to a stab wound in his abdomen. When the extraction team arrives Natasha falls back to let the medics take over. They fly him off to a military hospital while Natasha gets ordered on to a helicopter heading back to base. Inside, Agent Hill takes one look at Natasha’s bloody clothing and throws a t-shirt in her direction. It’s black, faded, and bears the name of a women’s college rowing team in Chicago. Natasha changes into the t-shirt without comment.

When it becomes clear after a few hours that Natasha will have to wear the t-shirt on the plane back to New York, Hill says to keep it; she’s been meaning to get rid of it anyway. “I was never really into rowing,” she sniffs. “I was more interested in the team captain.”

Two weeks later Natasha is in a department store and she stops in front of a stack of cotton sheet sets. She thinks about the colours and the fabric and how they would look in her apartment and on her bed, and realises she doesn’t know what colour she likes.

She chooses a set in pale blue because it seems the most popular choice after white, and that will have to do.

 

* * *

 

Natasha finds ‘home’ in the stack of books beside her bed, the teacup in the kitchen cupboard and the now forest green sheets on her mattress. Home is in the armchair in the living room that is the most comfortable place to read; in the print of a landscape painting she bought in Shanghai that hangs above the couch; in a joke Christmas card from Agent Carter that features a spider in a Santa hat, knitting a stocking.

She goes out for drinks with Clint and Maria and Morse, trains with Carter and meets May for coffee. She gets used to people watching her back, and looking out for them, too.

She helps save the world, and rejoices in the fact that she is capable of saving. She falls into Clint’s arms like it’s the most natural thing she’s ever done, because she fought for him and won, and he kisses her as they lie in her bed and it’s too good, too good, too good.

 

* * *

 

S.H.I.E.L.D falls.

S.H.I.E.L.D falls, because it was nest for people no better than the men who trained her.

S.H.I.E.L.D falls, and the ground beneath her feet is scorched to ash.

S.H.I.E.L.D falls, and she should have seen it coming.

She’s become too complacent, too accustomed to the thought of permanence. When Clint first showed her mercy years ago she had been exhausted from years of running, and the thought of being able to rest had been so seductive.

It was the same for Clint, she knows. S.H.I.E.L.D is full of orphans, fooled into thinking that their skill for destruction could actually be useful.

Natasha listens to Captain America detail plans for destroying the organisation she’d thought she believed in, and wonders how she could have been so stupid.

 

* * *

 

Before she leaves for the Triskelion, Natasha sends Clint a coded message that she knows he’ll find. _Go to ground, turn on the TV. Some of what you’ll see is true._

She has little time to lose after she releases decades’ worth of espionage dirty laundry onto the internet. Going back to New York is out of the question, as is stopping by the apartment she was renting in D.C. All Natasha has left are the clothes on her back, her weapons and a duffle bag with some things that she manages to liberate from her locker, including, bizarrely, Maria’s old t-shirt.

Natasha arranges to meet Maria in a car park before they go their separate ways for God knows how long. Natasha is hardly the only person left stranded by H.Y.D.R.A’s mess, and Maria must be swamped with agents trying to find solid ground amidst the chaos. Natasha is surprised that Maria even turns up.

To her credit, Maria looks tidy and unruffled, with the barest hint of concealer under her eyes hiding how little she must have slept this past week. She hands Natasha a bag with some fake passports and papers and Natasha accepts it for the generous gesture it is.

“You sure you don’t want your shirt back?”

Maria shakes her head, her arms folded across her chest. “I meant it when I said I wanted to get rid of it. Give it to Barton as a memento.”

No one seems to question that Natasha will find Clint. Such predictability should make her uneasy after a lifetime of being told that predictability will get her killed, but there’s a comfort in Maria’s certainty.

“Do you know what you’ll do now?” Natasha asks.

Maria answers with the barest shrug of her shoulders. “S.H.I.E.L.D’s gone. Doesn’t mean we are.”

 

* * *

 

Natasha meets Clint in a run down hotel on the outskirts of Berlin. They hid here once before when a deep cover mission went south and they needed somewhere safe to wait for extraction. The dampness in the walls seems to creep into her lungs and the bed linen is questionable, but with S.H.I.E.L.D’s safe houses all blown this place is better than nothing.

Clint sits in the chair by the window while Natasha tells him about the events in D.C. She recounts everything as if she’s making a status report: clipped and detached, with words like ‘neutralised’ to describe shooting people she used to consider allies. She doesn’t know if she uses those terms for his benefit, or for hers.

When she stops talking Clint rubs his hands over his face, his shoulders shuddering under the grey fabric of his t-shirt. “Fuck,” he says. “I knew there was a reason I hated Rumlow.” 

Natasha laughs without meaning to and then keeps laughing, the enormity of it all hitting her at once. Clint joins her and it isn’t funny, doesn’t even come close to being funny, and yet she can’t stop, she just keeps on laughing until tears form in her eyes and her sides are aching.

“So,” Clint wheezes when they recover. “What do you want to do now?” 

“I don’t know.” She lets the words hang in the air, fragile in their uncertainty. “I hear there’s a good bar nearby. We can toast our unemployment.” 

Clint smiles and leans forward to take her hand. Natasha threads her fingers with his and looks down to commit the image to the memories she hoards, because Clint is sitting next to her in a shabby hotel room in Berlin, and she isn’t on her own.

 

 

 

 


End file.
